House Committee Votes Climate Change Out of Existence

I kid, of course. Mostly. The Energy and Commerce Committee today knocked down three symbolic amendments to legislation that would prevent the EPA from regulating CO2 under the Clean Air Act. These amendments, each put forward by a Democrat, would have acknowledged that a) the Earth is warming, b) it’s because of our emissions, and c) that climate change threatens public health. That last was put forward by Jay Inslee, from Washington’s first district, just a few miles north of where I sit in Seattle.

But in three party-line votes, the Republican members of the committee unanimously opposed them. To be clear, these amendments had no teeth whatsoever. No regulatory anything. Still, the comittee’s Republicans felt obliged to vote them down.

Of late, allusions to Soviet Russia have become quite popular in certain quarters. While I suppose that progressive taxation and organized labor might look like Stalinism if you squint really hard, it’s also worth noting that Stalin was incredibly multifaceted when it came to repression. Not to go all Glenn Beck on you here—but are there other kinds of commie sleeper agents, besides the liberal ones we already know about? I submit that these comparisons can cut both ways.

For instance, did you know that during Stalin’s tenure, the law of large numbers and the idea of random deviations were declared “false theories?” If you haven’t heard of them, they are two of the bedrock mathematical principles that underlie all of statistics. Or that Stalin embraced a biological fraud who denied the genetic theory of inheritance, and imprisoned or killed geneticists who disagreed? There are many more examples of the Party “changing” science where it conflicted with the official ideology.